Long before the “letsencrypt” initiative, we already had another free and open Certificate Authority, called CACert.org. CACert is community driven, and uses ‘assurers’ who personally verify users’ identities, thereby building a “web of trust”. Unfortunately, the big players on the Internet (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft) have always refused to accept and incorporate the CACert root certificate into their browsers. Instead, after many years of imploring these companies to add CACert as a trusted Certificate Authority without any success, they spat in the face of the community and launched their own alternative for free SSL certificates: letsencrypt.